Has anyone else noticed problems with Facebook recently? I seem to frequently get connection resets, and not even when I am uploading the latest batch of photos. Generally it seems limited to the servers on the Georgetown sub-domain, but given the resets, I don’t tend to get much further. Apparently 8PM is prime time for Georgetown students.

Cut off from the social world, all I am left with is memories of IBM consultants talking about scalability.

Is this happening to anyone else?

ARUP Labs just sent me the following rejection letter:

Dear Jed,

Thank you for your interest in the Converted Candidates position with us at ARUP Laboratories. As a result of a thorough and comprehensive candidate evaluation process, we have filled this position… Please continue to monitor the job postings at www.aruplab.com as they may change regularly.

Sincerely,
Human Resources

This was confusing. ARUP is known to be one of the best companies for whom one can work, but I applied for this job three and a half years ago. The address in the email was four households ago. Errant database trigger? Or did my application temporarily get caught in an eddy of data management? And what is “converted candidates” anyway?

Well, everyone, it looks like I am not moving back to Salt Lake City. Georgetown will just have to do.

Update (8-28-2007): I received another letter from ARUP today. Apparently I am not going to be an entry level phlebotomist either. Despite my aversion to needles, I was still willing to give it a go. I must have really wanted to work for ARUP.

Given the rise in the social and viral aspects of the Web 2.0 movement (concept, effect, trend…) it is not surprising that Wal-Mart contracted with Facebook to create a sponsored group for dorm-room style called “Wal-Mart Roommate Style Match.” After all, what could be worse than mismatched comforters? For a generation of students who will most likely meet their roommates on Facebook before they meet in person and have the opportunity to fight for top bunk, a collaborative shopping cart seems like a good solution.

But the social web can be a unruly place, and unfortunately for Wal-Mart, Facebook groups come with a wall where users can post comments. And these comments don’t have to be nice. Computerworld ran an article that was quickly picked up by Slashdot, highlighting the reaction to the group captured on its wall. Apparently none of the posts are talking about dorm room styling.

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It seems that every website is bursting at the seams with the information it is trying to tell us, but lately I have been questioning this. What would it mean if we inverted the equation? What if it were the application’s responsibility to listen to the user rather than talk (or yell) at the user? What form would a “listening application” take?

Kevin Brooks, Principle Researcher at Motorola, presented on story-telling at Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week. While speaking on the role that stories play in our lives, he emphasized the importance of one reciprocal requirement of the narrative process: listening.

While his session focused on simple story structures and the interpersonal effects of listening, I am left re-applying the metaphor of story-telling to web applications.

The history of the web contains little more than a set of glorified brochures. Any story-telling is one sided, the web asking curt questions in order to provide small twists in the story that only it is allowed to tell. We on the other hand never question this, delighted when an application knows our name after only having provided it a minute earlier.

But what if the user was able to tell the story instead? What if it was the application’s job to listen? Kevin Brooks explained that when people take a listening role, understanding between people increases, the speaker is empowered, and the relationship between speaker and listener is deepened. More intriguing, Kevin spoke about listening addiction: “You just can’t get enough.”

An application that is gratifying, deepens connections with its users while empowering them. This seems like a metaphor worth exploring.

If your organization is anything like mine, many people don’t know what to make of the AJAX revolution. It seems we are at a tipping point. The web is now saturated with AJAX enabled applications, and development platforms now use these techniques sometimes with out developer knowledge (think .NET and the “god” object). It is not surprising that your enterprise security folks are beginning to take notice.

Last week I attended a training on web security at the SANS Institute where a substantial amount of time was spent on the “problem” of AJAX. I was stunned. The SANS Institute was presenting the security hurdles as so large, so unique, that enterprises should question its adoption. Ever since the introduction of AJAX, the internet has been abuzz with security related concerns, but what for?

I had the fortune of designing the first AJAX application at the AAMC. It was the MCAT Registration system which took a cue from Google Maps and represented test centers spatially and temporally by using a calendar/map combo interface. Registrants could search for test dates and locations via a DHTML interface and then query seat availability with a traditional AJAX call.

This project had numerous difficulties for every predictable reason (new platform, insufficient capacity testing, multiple external and synchronous web services), but amidst flooded database pools and Apache connection timeouts, people were desperate to know why we had used AJAX. These questions were baffling. For my team, it was the equivalent of asking “why did you use images?”

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Zend will be holding its annual conference in San Francisco this year. Zend/PHP Conference and Expo 2007 (or ZendCon for short) promises to bring together the best of the PHP community. Sessions will be attended, drinks will be shared, geeky questions posed (Do you know what interpolation is?), and life lessons learned.

I have submitted two abstracts for paper presentations, included below. They are both exciting topics that take mature development practices from other technology vendors and communities (primarily Adobe and Java), wrapping them up for the stabilizing PHP community.

AJAX Components written in PHP (submitted with Brett Harris)

Web 2.0 has made UI development more complicated. With these emerging techniques, developers lack a set of cohesive tools with which to develop these new applications. This results in ad-hoc solutions consisting of poorly written code and little documentation. Templating systems are accepted as the best way to separate user interfaces from business logic. Web 2.0 is moving us away from this traditional separation as more business logic moves to the client side. AJAX libraries provide the means for this redistribution, but have yet to be integrated with PHP templating systems. This session will discuss blending AJAX and PHP templates into reusable UI components, and the benefit of a componentized front-end. Audience members will be shown our approach towards building a cohesive toolset that simplifies development by standardizing the front-end resulting in easily maintained and documented code.

Test Driven SOA

SOA presents challenges for web services and their consuming applications. Developers relinquish control over crucial functionality when they depend on web services developed by someone else. In this session, I will discuss the use of test-driven practices and design patterns for developing service consuming applications. I will focus on the use of mock objects to mimic the behavior of actual services and explain how mock objects can be used to aid parallel development, functional testing, and debugging. Attendees will learn how to isolate external dependencies and how to simulate different behaviors of external services. These advantages will be demonstrated using an example release iteration of an application using mock objects.

“How is a Windows Domain like a cult?”, Kevin asked me far to late in the night for him to still be awake (midday for me!).

“Oh dear…”, I muttered in reply.

“If you join one you loose your identity, and if you try to leave you’re screwed.”

If you got that joke, or even still care, kudos to you. Otherwise, abandon all hope at the door.

In a gregarious act of ignorance, truely the source of most of my computer problems, I removed a computer from a network domain without reseting the password for the local computer’s non-domain admin account. Ugg.

Sort of funny – I am the one who is supposed to know everything, and what do I do? In a coun try without any resources, no reliable internet connection, not even a Windows CD to rebuild the machine with, I lock myself in a digital room and throw away the key. To make matters worse, I did this all in the few seconds it took while leaning over an engineers shoulder. He got a long lunch.

Windows has tight security, and everything I found to break password was either hundreds of dollars, or non-existant. And then:

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

It is a linux based boot disk that will fork into the user accounts on a Windows computer and let you change anything. Got to love that windows security. Take that Kevin!

Against my better expectations, I now find myself… well, “acclimated” is the word that Kara uses. Apathy might be a better choice.

The heat still rolls on, as does the sweat, but the only deficit I can complain about is any heat induced decrease of productivity. So much for kissing corporate American goodbye. It is so hard to get anything done. Like a creature suffering from reverse-cold bold, I find myself most afternoons laying on the couch, leg over the arm, laptop in tow, pretending I’m effective.

It was about the time I thought the heat might not be a deterrent from living here that the engineers told me that these are the cool months.

These engineers, Amitha (ah-mee-tah) and Anjuna (an-june-ah) have, to put is accurately, taken curiosity at me. I think they like me, but I don’t think I can say for sure. They are, however, enjoying my delight at the daily cultural spatterings they toss in my direction. I, in turn, am teaching them slang. (We started with “geek.”)

Sri Lanka, much like India, is known for their spicy foods. The have such a broad range of food options, sweet to spicy, that it is an absolute delight for the taste buds, provided you have the pallet. Kara (may she not suffocate me at night), does not. One day the boys (as Kara refers to them) returned with lunch packets. With the boys’ permission, Kara encouraged me to try this mixture of meats, vegetables, rice and spices, all wrapped up in a thin piece of plastic, twisted at the top, and like everything else here, packaged in newspaper.

Sri Lankans have an interesting way of eating. Kara and I have had a hard time finding silverware for the house because no one here uses it. Instead, a common meal is based on rice, which is eaten with the hand. You will pick out some curry mixture, or spice, or whatever is on your plate, and mix it into the rice with your hand, always the right (you don’t want to know why). I have been informed that locals are constantly mixing their rice, balling it up to create perfect little bites with precise portions of their favorite flavors. The food is then grabbed into the fingers of a cupped hand, with the thumb curled and held at the back. One opens his mouth very wide, sticks his fingers in and then pushes the food into his mouth with his thumb. Confusing? I am a pretty messy eater.

I think Kara expected me to gringo-out in response to the lunch packets, and what she expected to be unmanageable heat. Sure, they were spicy, but a good spicy. Turning her trick back on her, and winning points with the boys, I teased her for her taste buds.

This has become an interesting game with the boys, as they both seek out increasingly spicy local dishes. Today they returned from an afternoon break with what I think they called wavee. These little rolls with a local green pepper cooked inside are traditionally served with a chili mash inside, and of course, wrapped in newspaper. They offered me a chili-free version before I took the spicier option.

Trying to recover from the boys’ disappointment at not having found something to best me, I asked, on a scale of one to ten, how hot this was for them. “Seven”, Amitha said. We all decided that Kara needed to try these as well.

At the end of the day I walked out with the boys to the wavee stand, across the street from the Buddha shrine. I paid for the food and the boys said good night, making me promise a full report of Kara’s reaction to the chili paste. As I started back down the road to home, I took a bite into my spicy local haven and for the first time since I arrived, it began to rain.

Want to see where I live? (AVI, ~34MB)

Or so says Lonely Planet.

Apparently 74% of the population here on the island is Sinhalese, while the Tamils constitute about 18% of the population. Each group has their own language, but apparently everyone uses English to talk to each other. That, however, is a bit optimistic. Yesterday we sent time running around Colombo running errands. Interviewees didn’t show up, computer equipment was a challenge to locate, and through it all trying to talk to people was tricky.

No one who has spent any time abroad will be surprised, but it was the people at McDonald’s who were the easiest to talk with. We were supposed to meet a programmer there for an interview. It seemed the most obviously American place that we could produce on the fly. Without much surprise, he didn’t show. A text “Sorry, I’ll be late. Can you email me the details instead?”

This from the programmer who was supposed to show up a week earlier, never called, but apparently was in the hospital. We later found out that his father shares the same name, and it was him who was incapacitated.

So, we called people tonight to set up interviews. Talking on the phone is impossible, and reading resumes is more of an artistic experience. You know that objective portion that is on every Microsoft Word resume template? The one that we hate to fill out in fear of being so ego-maniacal? Well, throw 3rd world and bad English in there and you get something like this:

“Becoming a professional with multi disciplinary specialization and contributing through knowledge to create humanitarian society by setting examples in leadership, interpersonal relationships and good conduct.”

Say what?

(By the way, on the stats portion this applicant was quick to include “Skin Tone: Fair.”)